12/6/2020 Why Penguins Huddle - The Atlantic

S CIENCE
Penguins Are Nature’s Best Snugglers
How they huddle is so mathematically perfect that mathematicians can’t design a
better way themselves.
SUSAN D'AGOSTINO AND QUANTA AUGUST 23, 2020

LARS LEHNERT / 500PX / GETTY

Animals have evolved in myriad ways to protect against the cold. Whales insulate
with blubber. Bison congregate near geothermal springs. Black bears shelter in
caves. And emperor penguins, facing Antarctica’s subzero temperatures and gale-
force winds, huddle.   

“A penguin huddle looks like organized chaos,” says François Blanchette, a

mathematician at the University of California, Merced. “Every penguin acts
individually, but the end result is an equitable heat distribution for the whole
community.”

It turns out that penguins execute their huddles with a high degree of mathematical
efficiency, as Blanchette and his team discovered. More recently, Daniel Zitterbart,

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a physicist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, helped

develop and install high-resolution cameras to observe undisturbed huddling
behavior. Zitterbart’s team recently determined which conditions cause penguins to
huddle, and they’re investigating the possibility that the penguins’ mathematical
behavior may, over time, reveal secrets about colony health.

At the bottom of the world, hundreds of thousands of emperor penguins emerge

from the sea each April to trek more than 50 miles to their inland colonies. After
breeding, the females return to the sea for food while the males stay behind, each
incubating a solitary egg in a pouch above their feet. Without nests or food, they
brave the elements by huddling together on stable pack ice to maximize ambient
heat and minimize exposure.

[ Read: Penguins were a lonely explorer’s best friends ]

ough dominant winds can appear to push a huddle of penguins along the ice, the
truth is more nuanced. Blanchette and his team’s model made clear that the birds
don’t move in unison. Penguins in the huddle’s center, where temperatures can
reach a sweltering 100 degrees Fahrenheit, mostly stand still. A bird who nds
himself on the huddle’s windward side is soon driven to relocate to its warmer
leeward side. As more birds leave the windward side, penguins in the center soon
nd themselves exposed. In due course, these penguins also depart for the leeward
side.

Huddles typically last a few hours, during which the penguins may cycle through
multiple rotations from the huddle’s cold exterior to its warm interior. In the
process, each individual prioritizes his own warmth, yet the huddle’s heat is shared
by all.

Penguins seem to know what mathematicians learned long ago: e densest

packing of shapes on a plane is a hexagonal grid. According to Blanchette’s model,
the birds arrange themselves as if they were each standing on their own hexagon in
a grid. Most huddles start off as misshapen blobs. en, wind ow and temperature
around the huddle prompt a rst penguin—typically the coldest on the windward
side—to relocate. is penguin, known as the mover, waddles in search of new
neighbors in the relative warmth of the huddle’s leeward side.

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e mover selects the leeward-side boundary penguins with the least heat loss as his
new neighbors, assuming his new spot without disturbing others. (He may or may
not choose a spot that maximizes his new number of neighbors—in this model, all
that matters to him is nding the penguins with the least heat loss.) As he settles in,
one or more of his new neighbors may now be situated in the huddle’s interior,
without ever having moved. Meanwhile, on the windward side, the mover who left
his old spot vacant may have exposed a formerly interior penguin to the chilly edge.

As more penguins embark on heat-seeking missions, the huddle’s boundary is in

constant ux. Over time, rough shapes in the huddle become de ned. e original
blob transforms into a regular geometric object: an oblong shape with straight sides
and rounded ends.

Without knowing it, the birds have stumbled into an almost perfect arrangement.
Blanchette says his team tried to think of a better way penguins could huddle, “but
it always involved an omniscient being who would tell them where to go.”

Yet what prompts penguins to huddle in the rst place? To investigate, Zitterbart’s
team designed and installed a robust, remote-controlled observatory in Atka Bay,
Antarctica, and developed a software package that helps them interpret the data.
Work from this observatory supplements observations by onsite researchers and has
allowed Zitterbart’s team to develop mathematical models that accurately forecast
penguin huddles.

“For us, the relevant part is, ‘How is the penguin feeling?’,” says Zitterbart.
“Because how the penguin is feeling dictates how the penguin behaves. And we
measure behavior.” To do this, his team developed a notion of “apparent
temperature,” which re ects how ambient temperature, humidity, wind speed, and
solar radiation affect a penguin’s perception of the temperature—a concept
analogous to windchill factor for humans. ey also had to take into account how
far into the breeding cycle the penguins were. Earlier in the cycle the birds are
plumper from recent foraging, which lets them start huddling at relatively colder
temperatures. Toward the cycle’s end, the birds are scrawnier—their fat stores
depleted over the months of cold—so they tend to start huddling at warmer
temperatures.

Zitterbart’s team has gathered enough data to make increasingly precise predictions
based on all these factors. For example, depending on the point in the breeding
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cycle, they might forecast an apparent temperature of −44.5 degrees Fahrenheit as

the tipping point at which penguins will have a 50 percent chance of huddling—
meaning at that temperature, the birds are expected to transition from a loose
con guration to a dense huddle.

Zitterbart believes penguin huddles are so mathematically precise that the apparent
temperature at which they transition into a huddle serves as an indirect measure of
the penguins’ average fat content and energy reserves.

“Instead of weighing each individual penguin,” he says, “it’s as if we’re weighing

25,000 penguins at the same time.”

His team is now working to determine whether the initial huddling temperature
also reveals changes in colony health over time. Birds that have access to stable food
quantities over many years should arrive at their annual breeding grounds with the
same energy reserves and fat insulation every year. erefore, the apparent
temperature at which they huddle (depending on the point in the breeding cycle)
should also be consistent over time. is offers a powerful observational tool.
Zitterbart offers a hypothetical: If the penguins start huddling at higher-than-
expected apparent temperatures, it could mean that an altered food supply or
climate change has hurt their foraging success.

“All we’d need to do is take pictures of huddling penguins, which, compared to

taking a research vessel and driving around and shing, would be much less
money,” Zitterbart says. “We have a decade of data we’re trying to work through to
get this information out. is is an area of active science.”

is post appears courtesy of Quanta Magazine.

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